How to draw your own NSTabView tabs?

Question

I want to draw my own tabs for NSTabViewItems. My Tabs should look different and start in the top left corner and not centered.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

I've recently done this for something I was working on.

I ended using a tabless tab view and then drawing the tabs myself in another view. I wanted my tabs to be part of a status bar at the bottom of the window.

You obviously need to support mouse clicks which is fairly easy, but you should make sure your keyboard support works too, and that's a little more tricky: you'll need to run timers to switch the tab after no keyboard access after half a second (have a look at the way OS X does it). Accessibility is another thing you should think about but you might find it just works—I haven't checked it in my code yet.